Six ways to get more from Gmail

Make Google email do more

By Scott Spanbauer | 15 December 07

There's much more to Google's free email service than an inbox. Here's how to turn Gmail into a major productivity booster.

IMAP and POP3 support for Gmail

Next, configure your email program to send and receive mail via your Gmail server: Choose Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP, and click Configuration instructions in either the POP or IMAP section of the page for details on how to configure your software.

For a POP3 configuration, the server for incoming mail is pop.gmail.com on port 995 using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security; and the server for outgoing mail (which uses the Secure Mail Transfer Protocol, or SMTP) is smtp.gmail.com on port 465 using SSL or on port 587 using the newer Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. Don't enable options to log on using Secure Password Authentication.

For an IMAP configuration, the incoming mail server is imap.gmail.com on port 993 using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security; the outgoing mail server (which uses the Secure Mail Transfer Protocol, or SMTP) is smtp.gmail.com on port 465 using SSL or on port 587 using TLS.

Whether you choose IMAP or POP3, as soon as your email program connects to the Gmail server, it will find and display your Gmail labels - including 'Sent Mail', 'Spam', and 'Starred' - as folders.

If you choose POP3, creating or deleting folders in your mail program won't affect your Gmail labels, but deleting a folder will also delete the files contained in the folder from the Gmail server (just as you'd expect). If you choose IMAP, creating or deleting folders in your mail program will create or remove the corresponding label on Gmail, because that's where the folders/labels actually reside.

Deleting a folder doesn't delete the messages it contains - just as deleting a label in Gmail doesn't delete the messages tagged with it.

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Comments

Jeff Porter said: I am disappointed with gmail I have never used an e-mail service which supplies me with so much Spam despite the filters I have put in place Closing my account seems to be the only way to clear the problem unfortunately the help files do not inform me how this can be achieved so I am still having to remove the Spam and empty the Trash several timeas a day despite the fact that I no longer use the gmail service